Egypt to Be Center Stage in Obama’s Address to Arabs

Egyptians made their way to work through a neighborhood in Cairo.Credit
Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

CAIRO — President Obama’s decision to deliver a speech here next month has given significant encouragement to a once powerful ally that has grown increasingly frustrated over its waning regional influence and its inability to explain to its citizens why it remains committed to a Middle East peace process that has failed to produce a better life for Palestinians.

After eight years in which Egypt felt unappreciated and bullied by the Bush administration, Egyptian officials were gleeful about Cairo’s selection last week for the president’s address to the Muslim world. They said that it proved Egypt remained the capital of the Arab world and that it eased concerns that Washington might undermine its Arab allies in exchange for a grand deal with their rivals in Iran.

“The aptest choice was Cairo,” the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, told the state-owned daily newspaper Rose Al-Yousef. “It is the capital of moderation in Islam and the capital of cultural sway in the Arab and Muslim worlds.”

Still, President Obama’s decision to address a deeply skeptical Arab audience from Cairo is fraught with potential land mines, according to political analysts, human rights advocates and government officials. He has selected an authoritarian state where political and economic reform has stalled under President Hosni Mubarak, 82, who has been in power for nearly 30 years.

Those factors will put some pressure on Mr. Obama to at least address the issue of democracy and human rights. The Egyptian government bristles at outside pressure, and the general population often sees hypocrisy when Western leaders call for democracy, then partner with authoritarian leaders.

“America’s standing alongside authoritarian regimes is what created terrorism in the Arab world,” said Ayman Nour, a former presidential candidate who was recently freed after more than three years in prison here on what were widely seen as politically inspired charges. “It is what strengthened the thorn of extremism in the Arab world.”

Photo

Gazans waiting in Rafah to cross into Egypt. Many expect President Obama to push to open the crossings in Israel.Credit
Khalil Hamra/Associated Press

Even before the issue of human rights is raised, though, Egyptian leaders and activists will be looking for Mr. Obama to address their first priority: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If Mr. Obama wants to improve United States relations with the Muslim world, that is the first step, many here said.

There was a time when progress on process was enough, they argued. Not anymore.

People here want results, a challenge made all the more complicated for Mr. Obama by recent regional developments: the splintering of the Palestinian leadership; the empowerment of militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas; lingering anger over Israel’s offensive in Gaza; and the aggressive foreign policy of Iran.

Still, there will be an expectation that Mr. Obama drive real changes, initially by having Israel freeze settlements, dismantle checkpoints and open the crossings to Gaza, officials here said.

“For 18 years, the peace process has gone on?” said a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat speaking anonymously under diplomatic rules. “Who in their right mind would think it can go on for another 18 years?”

Egypt sees in the peace process the key to most regional problems, from its diminished credibility to what it perceives as the rising threat of Iran. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who met with Mr. Mubarak on Monday in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik, has tried to promote the idea that Arabs, Israelis and Americans have a common enemy in Iran and should first unite against that threat.

Egypt agrees, but only to a point.

Egypt maintains that to tame Iran — with which it is in open conflict — the issue of a Palestinian state must first be resolved. As long as that conflict is festering, Iran will be able to undermine Egypt by attacking its allegiance to the peace treaty with Israel, officials here said. Egypt has struggled to convince its people, and Arabs around the region, that its commitment to the treaty is the best way to help the Palestinians and to preserve Egypt’s own national security.

“I affirmed the importance of resuming negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority for a clear political horizon that deals with all final status issues and that establishes an independent Palestinian state to live alongside Israel,” Mr. Mubarak said after meeting with Mr. Netanyahu.

Egypt has already made clear that it cannot begin to give until it gets. That is why Egypt — along with the 21 other members of the Arab League — last week flatly rejected a proposal floated by Washington’s emissaries in the region that called on the Arab states to drop their demands for the right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel.

Concessions would only undermine Egypt with its adversaries, primarily Iran, analysts here said. Ambassador Hesham Youssef, chief of staff to the Arab League, said he was hopeful that President Obama would spell out a specific plan when he spoke in Cairo.

“The question is not talking about the issues; the question is changes on the ground,” Mr. Youssef said.

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But even if Mr. Obama manages to satisfy on the Palestinian question, he will have to step carefully around the issue of human rights and democracy. It is a treacherous subject, almost a no-win situation for any outsider.

If he presses Cairo on freedom issues, he risks alienating a government he needs for strategic reasons. He could also incite anger among average Egyptians who almost instinctively recoil at outsiders’ telling them what to do. And yet, if he does not raise the issues, he could be taken to task for conveniently overlooking a serious point.

“We have not seen any American commitments in supporting democracy and respecting the wishes of Arab and Muslim people,” said Essam el-Arian, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned but tolerated organization that is the only real opposition movement in the country and supports the application of Islamic law. “It can be summed by measuring American interests with American values.”

There is, however, a way to navigate the issue of human rights, said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian democracy advocate living in self-imposed exile because the government has threatened to jail him. He said he recently spoke with Mr. Obama’s advisers and suggested that the speech address the “infrastructure of democracy, which to us is the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, free media, autonomous civil society and gender equality.”

“If those five things are emphasized without talking about democracy as such, we democrats in nondemocratic countries would be more than happy,” he said.

Samer al-Atrush contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Egypt Prepares for Center Stage When Obama Addresses Arabs. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe